“A harp in the hallway”: Edna O’Brien and Jewish-Irish Whiteness in Zuckerman Unboundhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/629730
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On the 19th of March, 2013, the Irish author Edna O’Brien stepped onto the stage of the Newark Library auditorium and gave a stirring introduction to her long-time friend, Philip Roth: “Feared and revered, plagiarized, envied, hermit and jester, lover and hater, foolish but formidable, too adorable for words, a very great friend, and undoubtedly, one of Yeats’s Olympians” (“Roth@80”). Her presence at Roth’s eightieth birthday and de facto retirement celebrations served to underscore her curious absence from Roth scholarship. Though Roth has interviewed O’Brien, prefaced her work, and quoted her in epigraph, she rarely appears in Roth criticism.1 Yet where she is mentioned she provides stimulating perspectives on
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmall“A harp in the hallway”: Edna O’Brien and Jewish-Irish Whiteness in Zuckerman Unbound2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University Press“A harp in the hallway”: Edna O’Brien and Jewish-Irish Whiteness in Zuckerman UnboundNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®961352016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09Philip Roth’s Chekhovian Formula: Suicide and Art in The Humbling and The Seagullhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/629731
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In Philip Roth’s The Humbling (2009), actor Simon Axler suddenly and inexplicably loses his magic. Axler is devastated and, much like Mickey Sabbath before him, contemplates suicide throughout the novel without finding the means to go through with it. Only when he intuits that he will have to act a role does he succeed with his self-destructive plan: “[H]e would have to pretend [. . .] that he was Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev in the concluding scene of The Seagull” (139-40). Axler finally shoots himself just as Treplev does in Anton Chekhov’s play. Accordingly, Claudia Roth Pierpont remarks: “[T]his is a man who keeps a gun in his attic, and knows his Chekhov” (309).Pierpont alludes to “Chekhov’s gun,” a
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmallPhilip Roth’s Chekhovian Formula: Suicide and Art in The Humbling and The Seagull2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University PressPhilip Roth’s Chekhovian Formula: Suicide and Art in The Humbling and The SeagullNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®1120842016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09“Tragedy wrought to its uttermost”: Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater and the Art of Dyinghttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/629732
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In the late twentieth century, a specifically American discourse on tragedy began to emerge, responding to what Brenda Murphy has described as “the putative inability of Americans to fully understand the tragic vision of human experience” (488). Perhaps the best-known figure within this discourse is the contemporary novelist Jonathan Franzen, whose essay “Perchance to Dream” (1996) sought to rehabilitate Lionel Trilling’s influential concept of “tragic realism” as a form of novelistic writing that would deconstruct “the rhetoric of optimism that so pervades [. . .] the American imagination” (53) and its commitment to the pursuit of happiness.1 Trilling’s interest in considering the political valency of a tragic
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmall“Tragedy wrought to its uttermost”: Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater and the Art of Dying2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University Press“Tragedy wrought to its uttermost”: Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater and the Art of DyingNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®1062002016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09“Juice or Gravy?”: —Philosophies of Composition by Roth, Poe, and Sartrehttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/629733
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This essay suggests that, in his seldom-read “Juice or Gravy?” (1994), Roth surreptitiously dramatizes the conflict between predestination and volition, relative to biographical writing. Roth wrote “Juice or Gravy?” as the “Afterword to the Twenty-Fifth-Anniversary Edition” of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), though he previewed the essay in the New York Times Book Review (18 Sept. 1994).1 “Juice or Gravy” has garnered sparse commentary among Roth scholars, perhaps because of its elusive significance. Roth, ostensibly recalling the early days of his career as a writer, remembers having visited a cafeteria where one of the workers would incessantly ask “Juice or gravy?” (“Afterword” 283) in order to top off the patron’s
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmall“Juice or Gravy?”: —Philosophies of Composition by Roth, Poe, and Sartre2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University Press“Juice or Gravy?”: —Philosophies of Composition by Roth, Poe, and SartreNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®639612016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09A Late Adventure of the Feelings: Eulogizing Male Intimacy in I Married a Communist and The Human Stainhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/629734
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In April 2013, two years after he had “retired” from fiction, Roth wrote a eulogy for his old high school teacher, Bob Lowenstein, published in The New York Times as “In Memory of a Friend, Teacher, and Mentor.” He reveals that Lowenstein was the inspiration for I Married a Communist’s Murray Ringold, and that, like Zuckerman and Murray, he and Bob had renewed their acquaintance after some forty years in the 1990s. Describing their relationship, Roth writes, “In the spirit of Bob Lowenstein, I will put the matter in plain language, directly as I can: I believe we fell in love with each other” (“In Memory”). It is a surprisingly frank and open declaration of love for another man. Why such candor might be possible
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmallA Late Adventure of the Feelings: Eulogizing Male Intimacy in I Married a Communist and The Human Stain2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University PressA Late Adventure of the Feelings: Eulogizing Male Intimacy in I Married a Communist and The Human StainNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®768172016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction ed. by David Brauner and Axel Stähler (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/629735
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Despite its size and scope, and its self-declared ambition to “deghettoise Jewish fiction,” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction is a more meditative than assertive volume.1 In part this diffidence arises out of the book’s commendable desire to question its own terms (“Modern,” “Jewish,” “Fiction”), albeit this questioning takes place alongside the admission that, as Mark Shechner puts it in his preface, “[e]ven in literary studies we live by branding” (viii), and, for practicality’s sake if nothing else, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. For editors David Brauner and Axel Stähler, this line is definitely not a hyphen: that habitual conveyor of “hybridised identity,” as in the descriptors
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmallThe Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction ed. by David Brauner and Axel Stähler (review)2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University PressThe Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction ed. by David Brauner and Axel Stähler (review)Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®122262016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth by Claudia Franziska Brühwiler (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/629736
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Following David Denby’s recent claim in the New Yorker that Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America was prescient in predicting the rise of right-wing populism in America, the popular conception of Roth as a writer of eloquent pornography has arguably transitioned into a view of his writing as a form of political intervention. As Brühwiler notes in her monograph Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth, this follows a trend for allegorical interpretations of the novel when it was first published (38)—but a study of Roth’s political perspectives nonetheless feels particularly timely. Political Initiation thus aligns well with ongoing debates, but its contributions to Roth scholarship would be
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmallPolitical Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth by Claudia Franziska Brühwiler (review)2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University PressPolitical Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth by Claudia Franziska Brühwiler (review)Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®124522016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 by Kathy Knapp (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/629737
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“Before is everlastingly gone,”1 Frank Bascombe states at the end of Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land (2006) and Kathy Knapp’s American Unexceptionalism echoes this truism by charting its consequences for the growing body of post-9/11 suburban literature that negotiates this post-traumatic environment with a focus on the quotidian, rather than the catastrophic event itself. In response to this question of why a contemporary rise in the white, middle-class, male suburban novel might insistently attest to this “before,” which appears jarringly out of step with the post-9/11 era, Knapp shows how the alienation theme has been gradually replaced with a new aesthetic that accounts for the fraught suburban experience of
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmallAmerican Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 by Kathy Knapp (review)2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University PressAmerican Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 by Kathy Knapp (review)Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®128432016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History by Bryan Cheyette (review)http://muse.jhu.edu/article/629738
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Bryan Cheyette’s recent book contains chapters on paired authors Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, and another on Primo Levi and Jean Amery; individual chapters on Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie; and a Conclusion that surveys briefly the work of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Anita Desai, and Zadie Smith. The Introduction contains extended meditations on Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, and V. S. Naipaul. His planes of analysis oscillate between what he terms cosmopolitanism and nationalism, a binary mediated by the quintessentially Jewish notion of diaspora. The goal of the comparative project is both to restore to Jewish writing a strong sense of its connection to decolonization (postcolonial), a cosmopolitan urge
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmallDiasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History by Bryan Cheyette (review)2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University PressDiasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History by Bryan Cheyette (review)Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®149762016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015http://muse.jhu.edu/article/629739
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What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2015, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the third edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style.Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmallAnnual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—20152016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University PressAnnual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®391152016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09Abbreviationshttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/630888
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The following abbreviations for Roth’s works appear within parenthetical citations. Listed below as Title [Abbreviation], abbreviations appear in order of publication date.Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories [Goodbye]
Letting Go [Letting Go]
When She Was Good [WSWG]
Portnoy’s Complaint [Portnoy]
Our Gang [Gang]
The Breast [Breast]
The Great American Novel [GAN]
My Life as a Man [My Life]
The Professor of Desire [Professor]
The Ghost Writer [Ghost]
Zuckerman Unbound [Unbound]
The Anatomy Lesson [Anatomy]
The Prague Orgy [Prague]
Zuckerman Bound [Bound]
The Counterlife [Counterlife]
The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography [Facts]
Deception: A Novel [Deception]
Patrimony: A True Story [Patrimony]
Operation
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Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/503/image/coversmallAbbreviations2016-09-09text/htmlen-USPurdue University PressAbbreviationsNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,English fictionRoth, PhilipAmerican fictionJewish literature2016-09-092016TWOProject MUSE®44082016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-09-09